Ukrainians in Indian jail involved in drone attack on Myanmar passenger plane – report
RT | September 4, 2026
Six Ukrainians and an American currently in prison in India were allegedly involved in a drone attack on a civilian aircraft in neighboring Myanmar, India’s anti-terrorism agency told a Delhi court.
The seven, described as mercenaries, were arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in March from different cities in India while trying to fly out of the country.
The Indian government “has received credible information indicating the involvement of certain Ukrainian and US nationals in a drone attack on a civilian aircraft in Myanmar,” the agency told a Delhi court on August 19 while seeking to interrogate two from the group – Ukrainian Viktor Kaminskyi and American Matthew VanDyke – in prison.
The court granted the agency permission for the interrogation. The details of the court filings were reported by the Indian Express on Friday.
The agency said 14 Ukrainians entered India on tourist visas on different dates and flew to Guwahati in the northeastern state of Assam, where they traveled to the state of Mizoram without the required permits, and entered Myanmar illegally to conduct a “pre-scheduled training on drone warfare, drone operations, assembly, and jamming technology” for ethnic armed groups fighting the military government.
Burmese news outlets reported that a drone struck an ATR-72-600 aircraft of Myanmar National Airlines, which was preparing to depart from Myitkyina Airport to Mandalay, on February 20. The plane, which carried passengers at the time of the attack, suffered damage to its nose, mid-fuselage, and tail sections. It is not clear if the NIA was referring to the same attack.
The drone was a first-person view drone (FPV) of the type that is widely used in the Ukrainian conflict. The mercenaries were arrested on March 13 after they crossed back into India.
The NIA said many of the ethnic armed groups in Myanmar are also known to support certain banned Indian insurgent groups with weapons, military hardware, and training.
The agency earlier claimed it found that several consignments of drones from Europe were delivered by the accused to individuals and groups in Mizoram. The arrested mercenaries also allegedly confessed that they were in contact with and helped in the activities of “unknown terrorists carrying AK47 rifles.”
The agency said it wants to confront Kaminskyi and VanDyke with certain witness statements to “unearth the larger conspiracy” in the case, details of the other suspects, and the masterminds of the operation.
It said data extracted from devices seized from them contained images, videos, voice samples, among other things, which have to be corroborated with direct questioning.
Soon after their arrest, Ukraine rejected “any insinuations regarding the possible involvement of the Ukrainian State in supporting terrorist activities” and demanded that India release its nationals.
VanDyke, the American, is the founder of Sons of Liberty International, which provides military training in conflict zones. He has reportedly been involved in other conflicts, including fighting with Libyan rebels in 2011.
The court in July allowed him special food items and a cook after he complained that the “spicy and oily” prison meals affected his health, but it rejected his request for treatment at a private hospital, and to communicate with his family in the US.
Israel’s plan for forced transfer with international complicity remains on the table
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | September 3, 2026
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated that the military would not withdraw from the territory it occupied in Gaza, Defence Minister Israel Katz asserted that the plan for forced displacement was merely frozen.
Speaking at a conference hosted by Ynet and Yedioth Ahronot themed “Decision Time: Democracy and Society”, Katz spoke of forced transfer under the euphemism of emigration as the only solution for Gaza. However, he said, the plan required US support which is currently not forthcoming. According to Katz, Arab countries pressured the US to halt the forced transfer plan in return for agreeing with disarming Hamas. Egypt, Katz said, is refusing to cooperate in the plan.
According to Katz, although no sources were reported, 80 per cent of Palestinians in Gaza want to emigrate but Hamas and the international community are placing obstacles in their way. “There are no countries in the world willing to take them in,” he said. “What is delaying this is that the countries willing to take them in want US support.”
Palestinians have been unable to leave Gaza freely for decades before the genocide. Leaving under threat of forced displacement does not constitute freedom of movement. Israel wants Gaza emptied of Palestinians by any means necessary – forced transfer dressed up as travel is the option that lends itself to less scrutiny, despite it being classified as a war crime.
But when the international community approved of Israel’s genocide by refusing to acknowledge it, it also approved the forced transfer that happened as a result of the destructive and relentless bombing. If countries eventually cooperate with Israel’s plan and Palestinians are forcibly transferred out of Gaza, the complicity would render even the usual string of condemnations void of any meaning.
“I think there is no other solution in the end that is in everyone’s interest,” Katz stated. Everyone being anyone except the Palestinian people. Katz’s message is that if enough countries agree to commit war crimes, Palestinians have no say in their forced transfer.
If, as Katz said, forced displacement is still being discussed, the Board of Peace is merely buying time for Israel. Whether or not Hamas agrees to disarmament, forced transfer remains the ultimate goal for Israel. In the interim, the usual back and forth rhetoric on what happens if Hamas disarms continues as background noise for diplomacy to grasp at. For at the periphery of all the futile diplomatic overtures, there is genocide, Netanyahu and a plan to empty Gaza of Palestinians by all means possible. As Katz said, Israel needs US help, which he said would happen at the right moment. “Then we will get the green light to advance militarily, territorially and in other areas as well,” Katz declared.
In that scenario, Israel would colonise Gaza, and the UN would have one less item on its agenda to write statements about. No more talk about genocide except perhaps a commemoration in graphic imagery at the UN and a hypocritical statement about human rights and hope.
Hope, elusive and ambiguous, was all the UN offered in return for its complicity in allowing Zionism to colonise Palestine. What hope brought in the end, was genocide.
Is Israel paving streets with Gaza rubble containing bodies – and is the Board of Peace funding it?
By Kathryn Shihadah | If Americans Knew | September 2, 2026
Muhammad Shehada (@muhammadshehad2) – the journalist at the center of this story – is an accomplished reporter and political analyst, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and contributing writer to the London Review of Books, Newsweek, Al Jazeera English, Zeteo, The New Arab, Israeli media 972Mag and Ha’aretz, and others.
Shehada tweeted on August 26 and 27:
EU diplomats told me last week Israel has been quietly moving hundreds of thousands of tons of rubble mixed with dead bodies out of Gaza to bury evidence of its genocide.
When the EU asked Israel why or whether they filter human remains out of the rubble, no answer ever came!
I’ve been informed Trump’s Board of Peace is paying the expenses of the IDF’s covert transfer of rubble (mixed with dead bodies) out of Gaza. The money is taken from Gaza’s reconstruction funds!
The Board of Peace official X account replied on August 28:
This is categorically farcical and unfounded — total fake news. At a minimum, we would expect such an “intrepid” reporter to reach out to us for comment or clarification before recklessly spreading lies based on anonymous sources who have erroneously “informed” you.
Shehada responded the same day:
Dear Board of Peace,
1- I have a tender issued under your name on 20 May 2026 that includes “leveling & compacting” work in occupied Gaza, do you deny that document?
2- Is the Israeli company Terra Firma NOT doing “rubble clearance” in Gaza allegedly with machines that take rubble & spit out dust while the IDF is doing road-paving work (specifically near Erez)?
3- Are you NOT in any way paying, compensating, subsidizing or aiding Israeli companies, contractors, individuals, the Israeli army or government for rubble removal & road paving in Gaza?
4- If you are involved, can you explain whether any effort is being made to separate human remains from rubble or detect potential mass graves under the roads being paved? The Israeli government is silent on this.
5- I have satellite images that show clear & significant rubble removal work in East Gaza in the months of May & June. Do you deny any involvement in this?
6- Do you have anything to say on Israel killing over 1,200 Palestinians under your watch since your ceasefire started?
How about Israel restricting humanitarian aid and preventing prosthetic limbs from going to largest cohort of child amputees in modern history?
How about Israel preventing repairs of basic infrastructure (water, electricity, sewage, hospitals, bakeries), or releasing all children & women still in detention without trial or charges?
All of those unfulfilled commitments were part of phase one of President Trump’s 20-point plan!
Remarkable how none of Israel’s violations of your ceasefire ever caught your attention once in 323 days, but my sole tweet did in mere hours.
The Board of Peace account has yet to reply.
Excavation equipment for me, but not for thee
United Nations figures indicate that about 200,000 buildings – 82% of the structures in Gaza – are damaged or destroyed. Buried beneath these buildings, thousands of Palestinians await retrieval and dignified burial.
Israel has hundreds of pieces of heavy engineering machinery, and is spending a fortune demolishing what is left in the roughly 70% of Gaza under its control. Ha’aretz reports that a single piece of equipment may be rented for $1,500 a day; the operator may collect $400 a day. Nearly $1 million a day is spent on fuel.
But while part of Gaza is being demolished with massive quantities of equipment, at unprecedented speed and cost, the rest is moving slowly with primitive tools. Only a handful of excavators in Gaza are working at all – the rest were targeted by Israel, or in some cases simply wore out – Israel has blocked the entrance of spare parts. Fuel costs are prohibitive anyway.
Palestinians work long hours with shovels, wheelbarrows, and their hands to dig out the remains of their loved ones, or clear debris from what is left of the roads or their homes as legions of bulldozers demolish neighborhoods nearby.
(The IDF said, in response to the Ha’aretz report cited above, “According to army orders, property destruction is only carried out when there is an operational basis that requires it, and the IDF has never had a policy that allows for the deliberate destruction of civilian property.” It added, “The IDF is taking various measures to minimize damage to civilian structures as much as possible.” The reader can decide whether the IDF’s statement rings true.)
The Wall Street Journal placed the quantity of rubble in Gaza at 68 million tons, and the number of dead bodies buried beneath the rubble at 10,000.
EuroMed Human Rights Monitor estimates that Israeli civilian companies are operating “400 heavy pieces of excavation, demolition, crushing, and transport machinery” to demolish remaining structures, crush the rubble, and load the debris onto trucks.
The rubble is reportedly taken to “undisclosed sites” in Israel and the West Bank. Israeli authorities have neither revealed details nor permitted independent groups to observe the procedure. This lack of transparency does not imply innocence.
If the Israeli company Terra Firma is indeed doing “rubble clearance” in Gaza as Muhammad Shehada alleges, in the same areas where the IDF is paving roads, the similarity to accusations against the Nazis is eerie, to say the least.
If the Board of Peace is indeed bankrolling an effort to hide incriminating evidence about genocide, it would be no exaggeration to say Trump and the rest of the board are covering up a genocide.
What do we know about the Board of Peace?
The so-called Board of Peace is a pay-to-play group of wealthy and powerful Israel supporters, dictators, and authoritarians, as well as Israeli prime minister and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu and two Israeli real estate tycoons – but no Palestinians. In fact, the organization’s charter makes no reference to Gaza.
The lower-tier technocratic committee, made up of Palestinians, will do the grunt work in Gaza – if and when Israel allows the group to enter the Strip.
BoP is problematic in multiple ways, not the least of which is its tendency to view the world through a real estate lens, rather than human rights, justice, or humanitarianism.
New US ‘precision’ missiles responsible for multiple civilian deaths in Iran – report
RT | September 1, 2026
The US killed multiple civilians in southern Iran using new “precision” missiles with a wide damage radius, conflict monitoring group Airwars has found. Tehran has repeatedly accused Washington of war crimes since the US and Israel launched a war on Iran which has killed up to 3,000 civilians.
In an investigation published on Monday, the London-based watchdog examined three February 28 strikes in the city of Lamerd that killed at least 21 civilians, including seven children. It concluded that the weapons used were likely Lockheed Martin’s Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM), which made their combat debut during the opening phase of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
The PrSM is designed to explode above the ground, spraying tens of thousands of dense tungsten pellets in all directions rather than relying primarily on the blast itself.
Airwars found that civilians were killed at least 50 meters from the estimated detonation points, while damage extended as far as 150 meters. The three missiles exploded over two residential neighborhoods and a sports center.
Among those killed was a two-year-old girl struck while playing outside her home around 50 meters from one blast. Another strike over a sports hall killed seven civilians, most of them children.
No military personnel were reported killed, and Airwars found no evidence that military infrastructure had been hit. A nearby Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound appeared undamaged.
The Associated Press separately reviewed the evidence and consulted six weapons experts, including two former military officials, who also assessed that PrSMs were responsible for the strikes.
“You would be hard-pressed to find a reason to use the PrSM in a densely populated area,” former US Army adviser Michael Meier told AP.
US Central Command has acknowledged deploying PrSMs against Iran, describing their use as a “historic first,” but has denied firing any weapons at Lamerd. It has instead suggested that an Iranian cruise missile was to blame, although weapons experts cited by AP and Airwars disputed that assessment.
The PrSM had only recently completed its prototype phase and had not completed operational testing before its combat debut in Iran. A US Army official later said a deployed unit exhausted its entire stock of the missiles early in the war. Washington has since committed billions of dollars to expanding production.
Tehran has repeatedly accused Washington of war crimes over strikes on civilian areas. The Lamerd attack came on the same day as the US bombing of an elementary school in Minab, which killed 175 people, most of them children.
The Airwars findings come as direct US-Iran hostilities resumed over the weekend after a month-long lull. Washington struck Iran’s Larak Island on Sunday, prompting Tehran to launch missiles and drones at US military facilities in Jordan.
US President Donald Trump has since threatened another round of attacks, saying Washington would “hit Iran hard.”
India’s anti-terror agency to question jailed Ukrainian mercenary
RT | September 1, 2026
India’s federal anti-terror agency will interrogate a Ukrainian and an American who were arrested in March for allegedly entering the country’s restricted areas without permits, and crossing over into neighboring Myanmar to provide training to armed groups.
A Delhi court on Monday allowed the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to interrogate Ukrainian Viktor Kaminskyi and American Matthew VanDyke on September 2 and 3.
Both men are currently in Delhi’s Tihar jail. The two, along with five other Ukrainians – Petro Hurba, Taras Slyviak, Ivan Sukmanovskyi, Marian Stefankiv, and Maksim Honcharuk – were arrested from three different cities while trying to fly out of the country.
It is not immediately clear why the NIA is interrogating only two from the group. The agency earlier recorded voice samples of all the arrested individuals.
Soon after their arrest, Ukraine rejected “any insinuations regarding the possible involvement of the Ukrainian State in supporting terrorist activities” and demanded that India release its nationals.
The NIA earlier reportedly found evidence that multiple consignments of drones from Europe were delivered by the accused to individuals and groups in the northeastern Indian state of Mizoram, where they crossed into Myanmar.
Myanmar insurgent groups are reportedly linked to rebel outfits in India’s northeast region – drawing the attention of Indian agencies to the group’s activities.
VanDyke is the founder of Sons of Liberty International, which provides military training in conflict zones. He has reportedly been involved in conflicts in the past, including fighting with Libyan rebels in 2011.
His family and lawyers said on Sunday that a Delhi court rejected their request – citing his deteriorating health – to allow him treatment at a private hospital, and to communicate with his family in the US. In July, the court allowed him special food items and a cook after he complained that the “spicy and oily” prison meals affected his health.
The family said the US ambassador to India, Sergio Gor, briefed Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio about Van Dyke in May.
In a statement posted on X, Sons of Liberty demanded “urgent US diplomatic intervention” to bring VanDyke home.
No Matter Who Is In Power, Israel Will Stay Genocidal.
By Justin K.P. | The Dissident | August 29, 2026
There is a possibility that Benjamin Netanyahu will no longer be Prime Minister of Israel following the upcoming elections in October, with the opposition party Yashar led by former IDF Chief of the General Staff Gadi Eisenkot leading in many polls.
But removing Netanyahu and replacing him with Gadi Eisenkot will not change Israel’s genocidal nature.
In fact, it was Gadi Eisenkot who invented the Israeli military doctrine that functioned as the blueprint for the Genocide in Gaza, called the Dahiya Doctrine.
This Doctrine was invented by Eisenkot when he was Chief of Northern Command during the Israeli assault on Lebanon in 2006.
“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved”, Eisenkot said, referring to the doctrine in 2008.
It was exactly this doctrine of collective civilian punishment which was used during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2008, which killed 1,400 Palestinians, including 300 children, and Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in 2014, which killed more than 1,500 Palestinian civilians, including 500 children.
This doctrine was eventually applied during the Israeli genocide in Gaza starting in October of 2023.
Gadi Eisenkot was also responsible for the mass slaughter of peaceful Palestinian protestors during the Great March of Return in 2018.
As the Institute for Middle East Understanding documented:
- Eisenkot was chief of staff of the Israeli military in 2018 when Israeli snipers killed at least 189 unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza, including 35 children, three paramedics, and two journalists, and wounded more than 6,000 others, during the Great March of Return. As noted by the Israeli rights group, B’Tselem.
- “Over the course of the protests, the Israeli military implemented an open-fire policy of using live fire against unarmed protestors who posed no threat to the well-armored soldiers on the other side of the fence or to anyone else.”
- An independent U.N. commission of inquiry into the protests concluded there were: “reasonable grounds to believe that during the Great March of Return, Israeli soldiers committed violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Some of those violations may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity.”
Gadi Eisenkot opposes any kind of sovereignty for Palestinians, recently telling Israel Hayom “The two-state solution is a grave mistake” and “Anyone who thinks about a two-state solution after Oct. 7 is simply delusional.”
As for the West Bank, journalist Séamus Malekafzali noted in the Nation that he has espoused support for “maintaining settlements in the West Bank, opposing full annexation not because it is against international law or morally wrong, but because the new Arab population would endanger the Jewish majority in Israel.”
As for Lebanon, Gadi Eisenkot has positioned himself as more extreme than Netanyahu.
Malekafzali noted that, “In some respects, Eisenkot has gone even further than Netanyahu. He criticized the original ceasefire agreement in Lebanon that still allowed Israel almost total freedom of action, and in March, advocated ‘maximum force in minimum time,’ hoping to cause religious strife in Lebanon by ‘humiliating’ the Shia population by forcing them into Christian areas.”
In reality, Gadi Eisenkot, if he is able to win a majority or minority government in October, will be a more suitable face for the Israeli occupation than Benjamin Netanyahu.
While he likely will shy away from the same genocidal rhetoric as Netanyahu and the Likud coalition, this will only be done for propaganda purposes.
In reality, he is the creator of the doctrine the Gaza genocide is based on, and engineered the slaughter of Palestinian protestors during the Great March of Return.
He will put a more respectable face on Israel, while continuing to deny any kind of sovereignty for Palestinians and pushing forward with an Israeli occupation of South Lebanon.
Israel provides covert intelligence, security assistance to Sudan’s RSF militia: Report
The Cradle | August 30, 2026
The leadership of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a militia accused of genocide in Sudan, has maintained secret, high-level security and intelligence contacts with Israel since before the start of the civil war in 2023, Africa Intelligence reported on 28 August.
According to the report, RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, secretly visited Tel Aviv in May 2025 and February 2026 for meetings with the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Africa Division and Israeli intelligence officers.
Hemedti was joined by his two brothers, Abdul Rahim, the RSF’s second-in-command, and Algoney, on both trips.
Links between the RSF, which is fighting against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and Israel have emerged previously.
In 2022, Israeli newspaper Haaretz and Dutch investigative news outlet Lighthouse reported that a jet linked to former Israeli intelligence officer Tal Dilian delivered sophisticated EU-made phone-surveillance and hacking equipment to the RSF.
Dilian is the founder of the Intellexa network, a private intelligence firm based in Cyprus.
While Israel provides security and intelligence assistance to the RSF, the UAE remains the RSF’s principal backer.
Abu Dhabi provides the Sudanese militia with heavy weapons, drones, armored vehicles, ammunition, logistics, transit routes, and foreign mercenaries, in particular from Colombia.
The US government, UN, and various rights groups have documented that the RSF committed genocide in Sudan.
Last month, a coalition of rights groups led by the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights petitioned the International Criminal Court (ICC) to open an investigation into senior UAE officials and other regional figures for complicity in the genocide of non-Arab tribes in Sudan.
The submission accused them of enabling genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity by supplying the RSF and the SAF with weapons, money, and mercenaries, and knowingly assisting crimes carried out by a group.
Sudanese survivors filed a separate request naming Emirati Vice President Mansour bin Zayed Al-Nahyan over his role in financing and supplying the RSF.
That filing sets out murder, torture, and rape, including fighters driving vehicles over fleeing civilians. It points to the fall of El-Fasher on 26 October 2025, where UN reports record 6,000 people killed in three days.
The UK has also covertly assisted the RSF.
London has licensed around $565 million worth of weapons sales to the UAE across the past three years, including British-manufactured equipment that has repeatedly ended up in the hands of the RSF.
Nathaniel Raymond of Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab told the House of Commons that British officials disregarded two years of real-time intelligence on the coming slaughter, which killed an estimated 60,000 people.
Raymond testified that the UK “prioritized HMG’s economic, security, and diplomatic relationships with the UAE above preventing the intentional starvation, forced displacement, and the genocidal slaughter” of civilians.
Up to 3,000 people forcibly disappeared in Gaza during Israeli war: Rights group
MEMO | August 29, 2026
Between 2,500 and 3,000 people are estimated to have been subjected to enforced disappearance in the Gaza Strip during Israel’s war, a Palestinian rights group said Saturday, on the eve of the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, Anadolu reports.
The Palestinian Center for Missing and Forcibly Disappeared Persons issued the estimate based on an analytical study of a sample of 317 cases, saying the findings showed indicators warranting an investigation into the possibility of a broader pattern of enforced disappearances in Gaza.
The center said its study was based on reports submitted by families of missing people and cases documented in the field and did not represent all cases of missing or forcibly disappeared people in Gaza.
Of the 317 cases examined, 302, or 95.27%, were males and 15 were females. The sample included 41 children and 17 people aged 60 or older.
Gaza City recorded the largest number with 89 cases, followed by northern Gaza with 74, Khan Younis with 59, central Gaza with 37 and Rafah with 32.
Regarding the circumstances of the disappearances, 76 cases occurred during Israeli military raids on homes or sieges of neighborhoods, while 60 occurred as people attempted to return to their homes or retrieve necessities.
Another 42 cases were recorded during displacement or while passing through military checkpoints, and 39 while people were searching for food or waiting for aid.
The center also documented 22 cases linked to the siege or storming of medical facilities or the transfer of patients and 10 involving journalistic or field work.
Separately, the organization estimated that between 4,000 and 5,000 people are missing and believed to be under the rubble of destroyed buildings, stressing that these cases should not be conflated with suspected enforced disappearances.
In April, the Palestinian Justice Ministry said more than 11,200 Palestinians had been reported missing or forcibly disappeared since October 2023, including more than 4,700 women and children.
The UN defines enforced disappearance as the arrest, detention or abduction of a person by state authorities or actors operating with their authorization, support or acquiescence, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or disclose the person’s fate or whereabouts.
The center called for the fate of all missing people to be disclosed, access for the International Committee of the Red Cross to detainees and the establishment of an independent international mechanism to investigate cases of enforced disappearance and hold those responsible accountable.
With US support, Israel launched its war on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, killing more than 73,000 Palestinians and injuring over 174,000, most of them women and children.
How Ukraine Weaponizes Drones to Terrorize Russian Civilians
Sputnik – 28.08.2026
Ukraine’s military continues to embrace a sinister and systematic pattern of warfare explicitly targeting the defenseless.
Fresh testimonies and official reports from Russian regions paint a damning picture of how drones and artificial intelligence are used by the Ukraine regime to hunt civilians, punish evacuees, and terrorize urban populations.
In a chilling account, Yevgenia Kirichenko, a resident of Konstantinovka in the Donetsk People’s Republic, described a harrowing evacuation during which a Ukrainian drone stalked her family.
The woman signaled to the drone operator that they were carrying an infant, yet the drone attacked.
The family survived only by diving under a tree as the explosive detonated inches away, raining shrapnel from above.
The targeted nature of these strikes was further evidenced by a high-tech assault on residential infrastructure in Sevastopol, which Russian authorities have condemned as an intentional act of urban terrorism.
- UAVs struck a five-story apartment building and two separate kindergarten facilities in the city
- Casualties were miraculously avoided, yet the intent was clearly lethal, Governor Mikhail Razvozhayev confirmed
- The drones were loaded with metal ball bearings – a classic anti-personnel modification designed to maximize human injury over structural damage
- The residential building was heavily damaged, over a dozen vehicles were destroyed, and the blast wave caused extensive damage to the children’s facilities
- Two civilians were wounded, including an elderly woman reportedly suffering a closed head injury and a man struck by shrapnel
AI algorithms are being deliberately integrated into this campaign of atrocity, specifically programmed to identify and destroy civilian transport.
Ukrainian military programmers are coding AI to specifically target passenger buses, says Russia’s Foreign Ministry Ambassador-at-Large Rodion Miroshnik.
Since the beginning of the year, nearly 170 passenger buses have come under fire in Russian regions. This calculated strategy has resulted in the deaths of 43 people, including three children, and has left 329 individuals wounded, 17 of whom are minors, according to Miroshnik.
US Looks to Revive ‘Prize Courts’ to Seize Iranian Oil Tankers — Reports
Sputnik – 27.08.2026
The US Justice Department is preparing to revive long-dormant maritime “prize courts” to speed up the military capture of Iranian oil tankers and cargo as US property, Bloomberg reported.
The plan would allow the US to seize oil and other cargo from enemy or even neutral vessels, sell it, and transfer the proceeds to the US Treasury.
Aaron Reitz, a US attorney involved in the initiative, confirmed that the Justice Department is “now reviving” what he called an “ancient body of maritime law.”
The move is expected to face legal challenges, as prize courts have gone largely unused since the Spanish-American War of 1898 and have been dormant since World War II.
The plan comes as US forces have already illegally intercepted and seized multiple Iranian-owned or Iran-linked ships since imposing an unlawful blockade in April.
The US lectures the world about “freedom of navigation” — then digs up antique courts to “legalize” piracy against whoever it decides to bully next.
Millions in Israeli military funding flow to US universities: Report
Al Mayadeen | August 26, 2026
The Israeli Ministry of War and Israeli weapons companies have directed millions of dollars in unreported funding to US university research programs for weapons development, either sponsoring research directly or serving as a pass-through entity for the funding, according to a Drop Site investigation.
A review of state and university audits, foreign-funding disclosures, and other institutional records identified millions of dollars in financial ties over the last two decades between the Israeli Ministry of War, Israeli weapons manufacturers, and US universities, much of which does not appear consistently in national databases intended to track foreign funding into US universities.
An analysis of audit records, building on findings compiled by the Antiwar Initiative, an academic research group that documents connections between universities and the global arms industry, found more than $15 million in unreported or inconsistently reported entries for funding tied to the Israeli Ministry of War or Israeli defense manufacturers.
Israeli Ministry of War funding reaches US universities
According to DSN, the true scale of Israeli support is difficult to determine because entries for such funding were often not reported in public filings mandating disclosure of foreign gifts, but were discovered by manually cross-referencing public and internal databases, audit records, and acknowledgments in academic papers.
Some projects listed in university materials as being sponsored by the Israeli Ministry of War or weapons companies also did not include the amounts of funding provided, or contained inconsistent or contradictory records in audit databases.
Drop Site reviewed and verified public records showing research grants, tuition payments, and gifts totaling millions of dollars to dozens of colleges and universities across the country. The data shows examples of financial support and sponsorship for American researchers from the Israeli Ministry of War, as well as Israeli weapons manufacturers such as Elbit Systems.
Records dating from 2004 to 2025 point to a large number of schools that have had financial relationships with the Israeli Ministry of War or Israeli weapons manufacturers, including Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, Northwestern, Georgia Tech, Texas Tech, the University of Connecticut, the University of Tennessee, the University of Maryland, the University of Florida, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Rhode Island, the University of New Mexico, Washington University in St. Louis, and the State University of New York.
The recorded financial relationships include time-bound research contracts and do not indicate whether relationships with the ministry are still ongoing. Previous reporting has documented ministry funding of programs at MIT and student protests there over the relationship.
In addition to financial support from the ministry and Elbit, records also showed sponsorship of individual research projects related to military technologies by Israeli defense manufacturers Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries.
Taken together, the records reveal an opaque defense-research pipeline spread across some of the country’s most prominent universities.
Defense research ties span major American campuses
In one example that illustrates the typical nature of these ties, a War Ministry-sponsored project at the University of Connecticut was listed in public audit records under the title, “Impact Point Prediction Research for Short & Medium Range Thrusting Projectiles.”
Connecticut’s annual federal-award schedules record $668,456 in funding under that title across nine fiscal years between 2013 and 2023, with the funder listed as “Israel’s” Ministry of War. Another Israeli Ministry of War-linked research project at the school titled “High Sensitivity SQUIDs for Magnetic Field Detection” received $251,336 in funding across the same period.
Federal law requires colleges and universities receiving federal assistance to disclose gifts and contracts totaling at least $250,000 in a calendar year from a foreign source, though transactions below that threshold may remain outside the public reporting system. But these multi-year contributions do not consistently appear in federal databases intended to help the public track foreign money flowing into American universities.
The Education Department’s latest public disclosure of foreign gifts and funding contains no “Israel”-attributed entry for the University of Connecticut, even as entries for ministry funding appear in other databases and audit documentation.
The Israeli occupation government and its allies in Congress are now seeking to transform relationships like these from a scattered research pipeline into formal American defense policy. The fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act already directed the Pentagon to establish a US-Israeli Defense Industrial Base Working Group to consider integrating “Israel” into what it calls “the American National Technology and Industrial Base.”
A proposal advanced by the House Armed Services Committee for the fiscal 2027 NDAA would go further, creating a United States-“Israel” Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative charged with expanding bilateral research, development, testing, weapons production, and industrial cooperation.
If these measures become law, the scattered funding connections documented in American university audit trails and research papers would become part of the American military-industrial base’s architecture.
Israeli weapons companies fund military research
Israeli forces have used drones, automated intelligence tools, persistent aerial surveillance, precision-guided projectiles, and large-scale data analysis throughout the genocide in the Gaza Strip, as well as wars on Lebanon, Iran, Syria, and Yemen.
Those operations draw upon technologies originating in the same research fields that the Israeli government and weapons manufacturers have paid American academics to advance, including video surveillance, human-activity recognition, autonomous flight, network analysis, target identification, magnetic sensing, and projectile impact modeling.
At the University of Central Florida, researchers have received funding from Elbit Systems to develop algorithms to recognize human activity and detect objects in video.
Records from the University of Tennessee show that a US subsidiary of Elbit also provided $514,500 in payments to the school between 2023, 2024, and 2025. The available public documentation does not identify what programs or researchers the contributions were intended to support, with the description listing the purpose of the funding simply as “tuition payments for various students.”
“For relatively small sums, like the price of funding a single PhD—Israel has gained major new capabilities that have bolstered its capacity to commit genocide in Gaza, carry out a brutal occupation of Lebanon, and spark a war with Iran that has escalated to a region wide conflict,” said William Hartung, a political scientist and expert on the US arms industry and Pentagon budgetary practices.
Many awards from the Israeli Ministry of War are classified as US Department of War expenditures, with the Israeli ministry identified as the pass-through entity that administers the grants. MIT, for example, has stated that the money for its projects funded by the Israeli ministry originated with the US Department of War.
The US provides an estimated $3.8 billion in annual military aid to “Israel” on top of other forms of assistance.
Some audit records identify the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which administers US security assistance and weapons-transfer programs, as the primary agency providing the funding that was ultimately directed by the Israeli Ministry of War.
The public documents do not establish whether every dollar for particular research support at a school came from “Israel’s” treasury, from US military assistance placed under Israeli procurement authority, or from some combination of the two.
Audit trail reveals actual numbers
In the summer of 2025, MIT professor Markus Buehler withdrew from an Israeli Ministry of War grant after a student-led campaign publicized the project. The decision followed more than a year of protests over MIT’s defense relationships with “Israel”, which the university says amounted to $4 million for individual ministry-linked projects between fiscal 2015 and fiscal 2024, plus $290,000 in fiscal 2025.
A trail of open-source records traces similar financial and research relationships between the Israeli defense establishment and schools in Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Florida, New Jersey, Texas, California, and Virginia.
At Columbia University, annual audits name two ministry-linked projects and record $799,190 in grants. One Ministry of War-funded project for “Direct 3D Printing of Integrated Electro Mechanical Systems” accounted for $469,999 from 2016 through 2021, while another for “Optimizing Micro Resonators Based Sensor” accounted for another $329,191 from 2021 through 2024.
Columbia’s fiscal 2024 audit lists the latter project under the US Department of War, with the “Israeli Ministry of Defense” as the “pass-through name,” and records $25,327 in funding.
The Research Foundation for the State University of New York shows audit entries for five Israeli Ministry of War-linked projects totaling $949,915 from 2010 through 2021.
Florida’s statewide audits record $1,195,795 in expenditures passed through the Ministry of War from 2012 through 2021, while not identifying the schools that received all of this funding.
Campus records connect at least some of the awards to the University of Central Florida and the University of Florida. One University of Florida engineering publication names an Israeli Ministry of War-sponsored project, “Coupled Size and Rate Effects in Ultra-High-Performance Concrete,” beginning in 2012. While listing the project under “Sponsored Research,” the newsletter did not identify the amount the school received from the ministry for the study.
In response to a request for comment about another $150,000 contract beginning in March 2015 that named the Israeli Ministry of War at UC Berkeley, a spokesperson said that, “UC Berkeley complies with all of the statues and regulations that apply to contracts and gifts from foreign sources,” noting that the school is only involved in fundamental research and adding that, “every government, every researcher, every person in the world can read the results of our research in freely available scientific publications.”
UC Berkeley did not respond to additional questions about the purpose of the ministry funding. Other schools contacted by Drop Site did not respond to requests for comment or stated that they could not provide information about the cited funding.
In addition to records from audits, public information from individual researchers provides more hints of the scope of Israeli military research funding.
In February, The Nation reported that computer-vision researchers Mubarak Shah and Abhijit Mahalanobis received a $200,000 Elbit Systems of America grant in 2020 to develop “human activity recognition” technology, while Mahalanobis received another $60,000 for algorithms involving object detection and human-activity recognition.
At the University of Maryland, aerospace engineering professor Inderjit Chopra’s research page lists two Israeli ministry grants: $150,000 for “Autonomous Operation of Micro-Helicopters,” from 2011 to 2012, and $300,000 for “Aeromechanics of Rotorcraft in High Speed Flight,” from 2014 to 2016.
A curriculum vitae filed by another researcher in a separate US Patent and Trademark Office proceeding lists Israeli Ministry of War funding of $150,000 for “Functional Targeting of Terror Networks: A Big Data Approach,” from February 2017 through December 2018, and $153,520 for “Fast Algorithms for Group Between-ness Centrality in Massive Social Networks.”
Princeton University records identify physicist Michael Romalis on a $600,000 contract called “Pulsed Scalar Atomic Magnetometer.” The university’s fiscal 2018 sponsored-awards report names the Government of “Israel’s” Ministry of War and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency as sponsors and gives a contract period from July 2015 through June 2019.
Texas Tech University’s engineering newsletters list another award for $400,000 from the Israeli Ministry of War to research a “Sealed Vircator HPM System,” naming James Dickens, John Mankowski, and Andreas Neuber as researchers.
The vircator technology has a clear military application: Texas Tech’s Center for Pulsed Power and Power Electronics describes vircators as compact, high-power microwave sources and says its work includes coordinating vehicle-mounted emitters with GPS timing to place a microwave “hot spot” at a desired location, an application potentially useful for combating drone swarms.
The purpose of a separate Israeli Ministry of War-linked funding stream at the University of Texas at Austin is less clear from the public records. UT Austin’s fiscal 2013 financial report identifies $58,992 in expenditures under an Israeli Ministry of War purchase order. Statewide audit schedules record expenditures under the same purchase order reappearing in public audit records from 2010 through 2014, for $299,952.
The audit archive contains still more Israeli military-named expenditures, including recorded contributions to Northwestern University and Washington University in St. Louis, and repeated entries for the Ministry of War in audits for the state of Virginia.
But the opaque nature of some support that turned up in public records means that financial and in-kind support to universities may not even be recorded in any audit trail at all.
At the University of Texas at Dallas, Haoran Wei and Nasser Kehtarnavaz produced a video-surveillance system in a study that the published paper indicated was “funded by Elbit Systems of America through a contract with the University of Texas at Dallas” without mentioning the amount of financial support.
The report also noted that the company had provided “far-field video clips” to help conduct their research on target recognition.
Federal disclosures leave gaps in funding records
Section 117 of the Higher Education Act generally requires a federally assisted university to report covered gifts and contracts from a foreign source when they meet or exceed $250,000, including multi-year contracts meeting that threshold over their duration.
Under the Education Department’s example, a five-year research contract worth $50,000 a year is reportable at signing because its lifetime value is $250,000.
The Education Department’s inspector general warned in February 2025 that oversight of the system was weak, with insufficient controls to ensure reporting requirements were being met.
The current disclosure thresholds also make it easier for foreign countries to contribute amounts below that number to avoid triggering reporting requirements while still providing significant sums for individual research projects.
That lack of oversight contributes to a situation in which millions of dollars from a foreign military under increasing scrutiny in the US for human rights abuses and facing genocide charges from international courts have been used to fund military research at American universities.
These relationships are now coming under greater scrutiny at a time when public opinion on “Israel” has soured in the US due to the genocide in Gaza and the Israeli aggression in other regional wars. “No self-respecting university should accept funding from Israel, given its destabilizing, destructive, and inhumane use of U.S. weapons,” said Hartung.
